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All materials are copyrighted as noted. The blog is edited and much of it written by Douglas Messerli

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Douglas Messerli | "Mariachi to Merman" (on Dan Guerrero)

On
my companion Howard’s 66th birthday, we attended a performance of ¡Gaytino! performer and producer Dan
Guerrero. The performance, which recounts much of Guerrero’s life was presented
in conjunction with a show at the East Los Angeles College museum of the
Chicano artist, Carlos Almaraz, who, as a close childhood friend of Guerrero’s,
played a large role in Guerrero’s memories.

The two grew
up together in East Los Angeles and moved, temporarily in Almaraz’s case, to
New York together, sharing for a while a small flat. Guerrero was gay and
Almaraz, at least later in his life, was bisexual.

Guerrero’s entertaining and somewhat
self-satirizing show is subtitled “Mariachi to Merman, Sondheim to Cesar
Chavez,” and the rage of those extremes are, in part, his defining life
experiences. To a mostly student audience of primarily Chicano students,
Guerrero explained that he grew up without defining himself as anything but a
second generation American; although his parents were of Mexican background, he
did not define himself in the 1940s and 1950s as either Chicano or Latino. Yet,
without him quite realizing it, he grew up at the very center of the
Mexican-American culture in that his father, Lalo Guerrero, was the famed
mariachi composer-singer. In a recent interview, Guerrero recounted what he
also reveals on stage:

I was just a kid
when Mom took me to see Dad perform at the Million Dollar Theatre in downtown Los
Angeles, one of the great
movie palaces built back in 1918. By the early 1950’s, changing
demo-graphics kicked in and it became the cultural center
for LA’s Spanish-language community.

You got a great
black and white film from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema
and a live variety show with the biggest names
from Mexico and the biggest Mexican names from this side
of the border. Dad walked out on that stage and, when
applause broke out, I knew he was special and not just
a “regular” Dad like my friends’ dads. He belonged to a
bigger audience than just Mom and me. I knew it at
that moment.

Late
in his life, Lalo, who has been described as the “Father of Chicano Music,” was
awarded a

NEA
National Heritage Fellowship in 1991, and was named a National Folk Treasure by
the Smithsonian Institution in 1980. President Clinton presented him with the
National Medal of Arts, the first Chicano to receive that award.

Yet, for much of his life, his son tried
to dissociate himself from that music and the world with which it was
associated. At one of his very first Broadway performances, Ethel Merman,
singing “Some People” in the music Gypsy
spoke what felt was directed at him. He sings a few stanzas in his performance
with great Mermanian gusto.

In New York he took acting and dancing
lessons, and tried out for dozens of roles, but as he jokes, there weren’t many
roles for Latinos. Of course there was West
Side Story, but, he admits he wasn’t the gang type. During these years he
had to control what now describes as an “expansive” nature, resist being, what
was then described as being “light in your loafers.” When Almaraz returned to
Los Angeles and art school, Guerrero admits feeling utterly lonely, alone in
the city he loved.

Although he did get several acting roles
in summer stock companies—groups, he jokes, so sexually charged that he even
had sex with a woman—he gradually realized that his dreams of being on the
Broadway stage grew fainter. Almost by accident, learning on the job, Guerrero
began an actor’s agent, becoming very successful, casting numerous figures in
works as different as A Chorus Line and
Cats. Among his several well-known
clients was a very young girl, who, however, was extremely wise as she sat in
his office suggesting roles: Sarah Jessica Parker. Involved with the casting of
the musical Zoot Suit, a musical
about the 1940s Chicano community in Los Angeles, Guerrero’s life suddenly came
full circle as he reencountered not only the music his father had created by
actor friends such as Lupe Ontiveros and others he had known previously.

That event changed reinvigorated him,
encouraging him to return to Los Angeles, where he suddenly began to embrace
all of the culture he had previously shunned. Working with everyone from
Sondheim to Tommy Tune, Guerrero now cast mostly Chicano and Latino actors, and
forged friendships with people who had known and respected his father,
including the labor agitator Cesar Chavez, at whose funeral he organized the
Chicano actors’ contingent. Years before Chavez had suggested to his father
where to perform, based on places at which he planned to rally.

Of course he also reforged his friendship
the boy who as a child he’d know as “Charles,” the now renowned artist Carlos
Almaraz, who tragically died of AIDS in 1989.

By turns campy, vaudevillian, and
historian, Guerrero tells a fantastic tale in ¡Gaytino! that results in laughter and tears.